Gendered Power

Scholars have grown increasingly interested in the women of Japan's Meiji era, and this book takes up that interest by examining educated elite women and the part they played in defining what it meant to be a woman in modern Japan. It builds on earlier work in English and Japanese, asking how political and cultural forces cast certain women as representatives of the Meiji empress's court or as models of proper Japanese womanhood.

The author contends that a network of women who came out of the empress's court took up feminine ideals that were spread through images, culture and education, and shaped them into the features of a modern Japanese woman's identity.